Empty Tables
by ShadowSpires
Summary: Dick does, in fact, know how to cook more than cereal.


Despite his family's teasing to the contrary - and the formidable amount of takeout menus next to his phone - Dick does know how to cook. He learned from his mother. She had loved to cook for him and his father, and for the various lonely souls around the circus. In many ways the circus was a family, but everyone had their stories, and not everyone had the perfect family Dick had. Mary Grayson was forever taking in strays.

Dick often thinks that his mother would have liked Bruce. If there was ever a stray in need of care, it was Bruce. Mary liked to take care of people. She would have bonded with Alfred over that, certainly. Dick also knows - in his darker moments, when he has once again been shunted aside, turned away by that man, or after a hard night when even his unflagging optimism can hardly keep him afloat; when he is tired of the night and the darkness and the shadows, when he longs again for the uncomplicated spotlight and the equally simple, all encompassing love of his family - that his mother probably would have hated Bruce, for what he had done to her little robin.

Dick was sure she would have loved his brothers, though. The bright, energetic, secretly sweet boy that Jason had been would have soaked up all her love and given her back the wary but still so true devotion that had shone from him. The man he was now would hold himself apart, even more wary than the child had been, hurt and damaged by his life, clashing with Bruce's methods, but still trying to do good. He would stay at the edges of her life, and she would let him, coaxing him slowly closer with subtle attention. Jason responded best when you let him come to you. But doubtless, despite his bluster, he would treat her to the same protective devotion he did all mothers.

Tim would have soaked up all her love into his starved soul and flourished…differently. Dick can't say 'better' knowing what an incredible man his little brother is growing into, but different. Happier, maybe. Less lost and aching.

Damian…Dick liked to think his mother would have liked his tumultuous littlest brother. She had amazing skill in her own arena, and though it was not combat, Damian respected skill. She was also a stern taskmaster for recalcitrant little boys when the situation called for it, as he recalled. Her combination of skill, no-nonsense attitude and open affection would likely have baffled Damian, but hopefully won him over.

Of course, if his mother was still alive, chance was he never would have met Bruce, or any of his brothers, his friends who were like siblings themselves. He refuses to do that math, to weigh his life as it is against that he might have had if things were different. That is what Bruce does every day, and it is part of the reason he had never moved on, past that dark night in an alley.

He chooses instead to be content with the knowledge that, while this is not the life he would have had, it is a good one, and that while it is not the life his parents would have chosen for him, he hopes they would be proud of him for the choices he has made within it.

He chooses to remember his father's strong hands, and his mother's warmth and caring as they were in life, only recalling their broken bodies at the edges of nightmares he can't control.

His mother had been central to his life when he was a boy. Was still central to who he was as a man.

She had taken such good care of his father, and himself, and the myriad of people who drifted in and out of their trailer come dinner time, drawn in by his mother's welcoming smile, and the smell of good food. So. Dick knows how to cook, learned at his mother's side, as she cut and slice, boiled and fried, simple dishes, but good, and filling, and in quantities than invited sharing and encouraged the lost and lonely to come find temporary solace with them.

That was the problem. Whenever Dick cooked, he found himself caught up in it, in the remembrance of happy times, and the past, and then was wrenched out of it, when he found himself with enough food for a small army of hungry circus folk; and no one to feed.

It hurt, almost more than he could bear, to know that his present family would never come together as his old had, to share stories and light and laughter over an overcrowded table, surrounded by laughter and open affection. To know they would always be fractured, that he would never get the chance to cook his mother's famous casserole and refuse to give away it's secrets as his family sat around to share it. That he would never send them home with full stomachs and Tupperware , and the admonishment to eat, and bring him back his dishes when they came again the next night, as his mother had done.

So, he got take-out, and ate cereal and hit the streets on the nights when his small apartment felt huge and oppressively empty, and tried not to think about the past.


End file.
